Incy and her little wincies

Here is the reason why there are so many spiders in our house, above. A single Harvester was spotted by Penny with her multifarious, newly-hatched brood.  As grandparents who find two little ones a full-on occupations, we can only imagine the work involved in Spiderland. But maybe they use some of the more drastic measures known in the animal kingdom, such as eating offspring.

Because of the well-known and touching book shown left, we have always tried to be nice to spiders. Instead of Hoovering them up (although I feel that the inside of a Hoover bag might be quite exciting for a spider), we use a special electric suction device which P found in a gadget catalogue years ago.

Here it is doing its work, below.  The mechanism is then reversed and the spiders and spiderlets blown out to start a new life in a bush, far, far away.  That's the idea, anyway. But the first time we used it on a big single spider, proudly demonstrating our pro-spiderness to our sons, they pointed out a while later that the spider had managed to leap from the bush un-noticed and was sitting happily on P's cardigan sleeve.